Something for the weekend

Lucky Dip

Some days you just feel like a right old soppy drawers.

Download: Make It With You - Bread (mp3)

What a Drag

Jesus Christ! Superstar!
Walks like a woman and he wears a bra.
Playground song, early 1970s

I once had to wear a dress for a school play though I swear I'm not usually that way inclined (it was Shakespeare! I did it for art!). But if I was I could have had quite a lucrative career in England where we seem to love few things more than a man in a dress. In most countries cross-dressing is confined to kitschy bars in the gay part of town but in England camping it up a nice frock, make-up, and heels will make you something of national icon loved by all the family from Charley's Aunt to Danny La Rue, Boy George, Eddie Izzard ("I'm an Executive Transvestite") and Lily Savage — and it certainly didn't hurt David Bowie's career. Then there's the stock English character of the accountant in suburbia who likes to slip into the wife's little cocktail number and mince about while she's out down the shops. I'm sure this all says something deeply kinky about us as a nation but that's a box I'd rather not open.

Probably the most famous pop song about transvestites is "Lola" by The Kinks (English band, naturally) which was given a brilliantly inspired cover by feminist post-punkers The Raincoats in 1979. The idea of Ray Davies' ode to cross-dressers being performed by an all-girl band constructs such a Hall of Mirrors of gender bending and sexual ambiguity you'd need several PhDs to deconstruct it. It's like the song itself is in drag.

Download: Lola - The Raincoats (mp3)

OK, I admit it, that dress was really comfortable.

Lucky Dip

Download: Police On My Back - The Equals (mp3)

Something for the weekend

Haven't had any Pauline Murray here for a while. Be still my beating heart.

I love the skipping and windmill-arms dance she does in this. A lot of punk girls jumped around like that, it was like a feminine version of the Pogo.

Remembrance of taunts past

You wouldn't think a record as inane and fluffy as "Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep" would have painful associations for anyone, but I do. When I was young some kids at my school used to taunt me about my one-parent status by singing "Where's your papa gone? Where's your papa gone? Far, far away" at me, and even over 35 years later I can't hear it without having flashbacks to that and feeling a little twinge of how upset it made me at the time. The little bastards.

Still, the sight of lead singer Sally Carr in her trademark hot pants helps to ease the pain somewhat.

Download: Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep - Middle of the Road (mp3)

Hart Taken

Another legend of British children's television has passed away: the great Tony Hart. He was the type you don't seem to get on kid's telly anymore, an older man who wasn't in the slightest bit trendy but was passionate and enthusiastic about his craft. Less your best mate than a favourite teacher or uncle.

His death is particularly sad for me as an art school boy who grew up loving his shows and was inspired by his creativity. I even used to get his books out of the library and try to copy the projects in them. How many other kids are there like me out there who really got into drawing and making art because of him? How many of those eventually went to art college and had a career in the creative fields? I'm guessing a lot. It could be that humble Tony Hart was the biggest influence on British art and design in the past 40 years.

What a bummer.

Download: Art for Arts Sake - 10cc (mp3)

Something for the weekend

Cliff has very expressive hands doesn't he?

I wish I was a Wild West hero

This might be a typically-pessimistic assumption on my part but do kids still play Cowboys and Indians these days? I find it hard to believe that they do. Why would they? The Western is nearly dead as a genre in popular culture, at least it is in any form that could be watched by children. To a 21st century kid with his video games and superheroes, Cowboys and Indians must be like playing Cavaliers and Roundheads.

I also imagine that any kid who shouted "Bang! You're dead!" at a friend in the school playground would immediately be carted off by social services for counseling.

So that means people will one day stop writing songs like this. One of the best singles of the 1970s, presented here in its album-length, widescreen Cinemascope version.

Download: Silver Star - The Four Seasons (mp3)

Picture Post

Even if I gave you a million tries you'd never guess what was going on in this picture. Believe it or not, the caption with it reads: "Models in bikinis deliver a letter of protest about French nuclear testing to the French Embassy in London, 1973."

I don't think this was some clever reference to the famous nuclear test site of Bikini Island because the French testing was going on elsewhere. No, I think it might simply be a case that in the 1970s if you wanted the newspapers to cover an event you had to involve half-naked dolly birds.

Download: How I Learned To Love The Bomb - Television Personalities (mp3)

Something for le weekend

I'm feeling a bit continental today.



With its poetry reciting and meaningful stares this clip from Jean-Luc Godard's "Alphaville" is like a parody of pretentious European cinema. But it's still utterly beautiful and Anna Karina is so lovely I think I could watch a film of her reading a Eurostar timetable.

As a bonus here she is again looking like every indie boys dream girlfriend in "Vivre Sa Vie". We never had no birds like that down my local snooker club.

Aunt Joan

One of the inspirations for this blog was the book "Lost Worlds" by Michael Bywater, an eccentric and beautifully written compendium of lost things, feelings, places, attitudes and people. So I'm going to be lazy and let him do all the heavy lifting for this post. Besides, he's a much better writer than me.

"Anyone born before 1960 will have known Aunt Joan, or a variant of her. Neat, effective, cheerful. Aunt Joan's response to the slenderest of pleasures was: 'How lovely!' She lived alone in a little house on a fixed income and did wonders for charity. All her Christmas presents for the nieces and nephews and great-nieces and great-nephews were bought carefully, with thought and love, throughout the year. Aunt Joan never had to make the panic dash on Christmas Eve, nor did she ever forget a birthday. She was tiny, courteous, well groomed, well loved and lived an orderly life, never causing pain or even upset; and at the heart of this little life was an incalculable loneliness.
Aunt Joan had a secret. It was always the same secret, for all the Aunt Joans: a young man, an understanding, plans, hopes — and a war from which the young man never returned. The end. You kept going, you did your best, you looked on the bright side and remembered that there were lots and lots of people much worse off than you were. How much of what Aunt Joan was, was because of what she had lost — or had taken from her."
Michael Bywater,
Lost Worlds (2004)

I was born in 1962 so the "Aunt Joan" in this sounds more like my Grandmother who was also tiny and cheerful (though my sailor Grandfather did come back from the war.) My aunts were more the type to just give us a 50p record token at Christmas, but it was Gran who actually took the trouble to ask us what records we wanted, which for a few years meant the poor old dear was going into her local Woolworth's and buying Clash and Stranglers albums.

Download: If I Knew You Were Coming I'd Have Baked A Cake - Gracie Fields (mp3)

More home thoughts from abroad

This chap is a British Army spokesman who was on the BBC talking about the troops spending Christmas in Iraq and I took his picture because his name was Lt. Col. Dickie Winchester. I didn't think British officers had such marvelous names as that anymore, at least not ones so young who didn't also have massive, Jimmy Edwards-style whiskers. With a name like that he should be leading men over the top at the Somme, not dull PR duties in Basra.

The other thing I noticed about Dickie was that, despite his old-school-tie name, he didn't sound in the slightest bit "posh" and instead spoke with a rather generic middle-class English accent that could be from anywhere south of Birmingham. There was a time when someone with his name and rank would have been all "Bally good show chaps!" and plummy, aristocratic vowels but, apart from the odd appearance by the Royal Family, these days you don't hear frightfully proper "BBC English" much anymore — especially not on the BBC itself. Apparently talking "proper" and sounding upper-class is out of fashion these days, something to be embarrassed about even among the upper classes themselves whose children are dropping their 'aitches and adopting the more common sound of so-called Estuary English in an effort to fit in with the new English egalitarian meritocracy — a country run by celebrities and footballers instead of the old Eton-Oxbridge network. Which of course it isn't, you know those buggers are still in charge.

The only time I heard an old-fashioned upper class accent in London was when I was having lunch at one of the traditional stomping grounds of British nobs, the Peter Jones department store in Sloane Square. Among the crowds of modern young couples pushing their progeny around in Bugaboo pushchairs I'd catch the occasional sound of some haughty, crisp old-money voice and it was such a surprise to the ears I'd stare at the person as if I was looking at some rare bird on the endangered species list.

I'm not turning into Evelyn Waugh in my old age and mourning the decline of the ruling class (plus, I talk common as muck meself), but what is a shame is the continuing loss of colour and character to the national palette and, I must admit, hearing someone crisply crossing their Ts and talking in those clear, cut-glass tones does sound rather pleasing to the ear (especially coming from the mouth of a Jenny Agutter or Joanna Lumley), and what a dull place England would be if we all ended up talking like David Beckham. Knowarrimean?

Download: The Ruling Class - Monochrome Set (mp3)